GuildCom

Believe it or not, like it or not, back in in 1998, Half-Life was the future of computer gaming. With the release of Half-Life 2 in 2004, one could say that the series (the canon included all of two games at that point, with Valve having seemingly disavowed all knowledge of Adrian Shepherd or Half-Life: Opposing Force) had become stale.

After all, it’s the same gameplay all over again. Silly weapon balance with a focus on balancing firepower and tactical limitations (e.g. the pistol has exemplary long range accuracy, but hits like a spitwad, or the crossbow has the longest effective range of any weapon and even includes a scope but suffers from a poor trajectory and extended flight time). There are no bosses to speak of — simply powerful enemies enshrined in puzzle-laden levels. Opposing Force addressed certain complaints (for instance: that no one weapon is better than any other), but Half-Life 2 is not an evolution of Opposing Force.

These issues are patently obvious ingame and become tiresome any time you find yourself wishing the pulse rifle were a little more useful, or that the submachine gun did not share the ballistic characteristics of a water pistol. But that isn’t what you read in the reviews two years ago, is it.

Because no one cared.

It’s 2008 now. Half-Life 2 is still the future of gaming. In Half-Life 2, you’re no longer playing a game so much as playing a movie. On a now defunct blog I commented at the time that the faces of your enemies are obscured by masks in order to allow the player some distance from the act of killing fellow human beings that, frankly, look human (in addition, of course, to the fact that they are traitors and are at best deformed and corrupted humans in the world of the game).

The “final boss” in Half-Life 2 is a teleporter meant to send a certain Dr. Breen (no one important) to an undisclosed location (nowhere important) and destroying the teleporter (which does not shoot back) does not actually prevent the whole place from blowing up and killing the player’s character (who is preserved, but by another means). Therefore, detonating the stupid thing was incredibly pointless — and yet it mattered at the time.

Why is a good question. Games aren’t supposed to invoke that kind of emotion, are they? And yet in the case of Half-Life 2, the outcry about the bad ending (it is a tradition in the HL series to give each game an incredibly shitty ending, so that was to be expected) had nothing to do with the lack of closure for the story (which we all expected, since Valve, along with several other developers, is trying to move toward an episode-based release scheme and, of course, everything has a sequel these days), but because it ended in a cliffhanger: does Freeman’s “love interest” die or not?

Immediately old school DOOM players like me want to know, “Who the hell cares?” But, of course, after playing the game we realize… We do.

10 hours of emotional investment will do that to a person. Just think: if you can mourn for the hero of a two hour movie when you know that nothing you scream from the middle of the theater will make any difference, how much more will you care about the hero of a video game when you’ve been fighting to keep them alive for the past two days straight?

That’s the real power of a video game these days. Actually, that’s been the real power of a video game since back in the 1990s when someone first decided, “Hey, these pictures can tell a story!” If you recall a little game called Dark Forces by LucasArts in their heyday, you almost certainly remember the sense of horror instilled by the second mission where you explore the remnants of a rebel city following a massacre, or the rage you shared with Katarn when he discovered that his partner, Jan Ors, had been captured.

…or, for that matter, the incredible sense of, “Don’t I have better shit to do with my time?” you felt when you were sent to rescue Crix Madine from an Imperial prison. (I still hate that guy, and I barely even know him!)

At some point it’s no longer the weapons or the gameplay that you remember after the fact (even though, yes, everyone still writes love letters to the double barreled shotgun in DOOM II). It’s the people and their stories.

If other people experience this in the same way that I do, it will prove exceedingly difficult to censor video game content in the future. For every Postal (if you don’t know, don’t ask) there is a Call of Duty — just as for every… (insert crappy movie here; I can’t think of any) …there is an Unforgiven.

Ok, actually, the ratio isn’t nearly that good. It’s much closer to 10:1 than 1:1. But if we can cut Hollywood that much slack, I think we owe developers like Valve the benefit of the doubt.